School Stories: The Power of Narrative in Teacher Education

Carla Mathison
Margaret A. Gallego

The Inherent Power of Narrative

I believe it was in the 1st grade. I was attending school for the first time in California and I, like most children, had no idea what to expect. I soon found that the teacher was assigning work for us to do, but for some reason I really could not understand what I was supposed to do. I would try to do my work, but it was never right. So I gave up, I started to stuff the papers I could not complete into the back of my desk. After a few weeks, I had quite a pile crammed in there. One day, my teacher approached me and told me to empty my desk. I pulled a few papers and pencils from my desk. She then asked me to empty it completely. I told her that was all, so she proceeded to remove all the work I had hidden in my desk and piled it up in front of me (and everyone else in the class). It was probably the most mortifying memory I have. Several years later, I was found to have dyslexia.

Joseph, School Stories

I remember in my 12th grade English course, my teacher made me feel important. He always had positive comments about my writings, and I was tops in my class. The teacher played a big role in my writing experience. He taught me how to be able to critique and enjoy my writing. He also showed me how important writing is, and how by writing, we are able to express ourselves.

Edwin, School Stories

We have all told and listened to stories. Intuitively, we know their power. They can agitate or comfort us, tickle our funny bones or sadden our hearts. Story delivers information in a manner that powerfully portrays the connection between individuals and their contexts.

The use of stories to help teachers focus on professional practices and beliefs has long been recognized as a valuable instructional tool (Elbaz, 1991; Feldman, Bruner, Renderer, & Spitzer, 1990). Many teacher educators use stories in various forms (i.e. anecdotes, folk tales, oral histories, biographies) to help their students understand important ideas and concepts. The purpose of this article is to examine the literature surrounding the usefulness of narrative in promoting comprehension, and to look at one Web-based example of a teacher education curriculum that uses narrative as its primary pedagogical tool.

While mastery of disciplinary content and pedagogical knowledge has been identified as crucial to successful teaching (Schulman 1987), a growing number of classroom teachers and education researchers argue that an exclusive focus on such mastery ignores the influence that personal and lived experiences have on educational decision making. Connelly and Clandinin (1990), Galindo (2000), and Hollingsworth, Dybdahl, and Minarik (1993) highlight the ways in which narrative and the telling of stories influence the ways in which teachers discuss their lives and their work. Further, Goodson and Walker (1991) suggest that personal experience provides the most meaningful access to wider domains -- as methodology for research and as means for informing practice.

More specifically in the preparation of teachers in the field of reading education, Vacca, Vacca, and Gove (1995) suggest that three types of knowledge -- professional, personal, and practical -- contribute to a reading teacher’s knowledge base and belief system. While Alvermann (2000, online summary) notes the use of the narrative form in literacy teachers’ own memoirs and their accounts of classroom literacy instruction (e.g., Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993; Lalik, Dellinger, & Druggish, 1996), she confirms that narrative as a form of research in reading (as in other academic fields) is challenged on the basis that it is inherently plagued with features that are counter to those held necessary for empirical investigation (objectivity/subjectivity, truth/fidelity to event, representation/generalization).

Nonetheless, over the past 30 years a steady stream of research using narrative forms as sources of data in case studies (e.g., Calkins, 1983; Emig, 1971; Graves, 1983) and as a means of developing feminist theory (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986; McWilliam, 1994; Witherell & Noddings, 1991) has been published. Most recently, the narrative form, in particular story, has been used to better understand the researcher’s experience relative to her or his interpretation and analysis of research (Neumann & Peterson, 1997).

Several findings in the reading instruction literature are relevant to the current study, in which narrative was used as the primary tool of instruction in a teacher education curriculum with pre- and inservice teachers. As an instructional approach, storytelling most often takes the form of reading stories as a means of activating students’ prior knowledge in preparation for new learning. What readers bring with them to the text (their existing knowledge and prior experiences) is highly influential to their reading comprehension (Rumelhart, 1980). Further, making connections from text to text, to self, and to the world is instrumental to children’s comprehending text and gaining subject matter and conceptual understanding.

For instance, Au and Kawakami (1985) found that their adaptation of typical reading lessons to include the “talk story” elements of traditional interaction patterns of the Hawaiian children they studied provided a way to support the children’s development of text-to-self relationships. The integration of a familiar cultural form -- that is, story -- provided the necessary link for the children to make meaning from text. Early in children’s school careers, narrative texts with storylines that pertain to familiar events, situations, and issues are helpful in providing literacy experiences through which reading competence can be gained. Later, as children grow in age (and maturity), the classroom texts also change: they become less specific and personal, and more general and abstract. In this way, a child learns to read and then reads to learn (Anthony & Raphael, 1989). But we continue to be strongly influenced by narrative, even into our adult years.

Understanding the definition of story may lead to a greater appreciation of its pedagogical potential for all ages. Scholes (1982) explains that a story is a “telling or recounting of a string of events” (p. 6). The creator of a good story has had to reflect on the order, meaning, priority, and usefulness of the events she or he weaves together. So, by its very nature, the process of good story formulation involves critical and reflective thinking. Olson (1990) states that stories “provide a format into which experienced events can be cast in the attempt to make them comprehensible, memorable, and sharable” (pp. 100-101). In a discussion about the critical relationships among cognition, affect, and action, Bruner (1986) also speaks of the value of stories:

We can abstract each of these [cognition, affect, and action] from the unified whole, but if we do so too rigidly, we lose sight of the fact that it is one of the functions of a culture to keep them related and together in those images, stories, and the like by which our experience is given cultural relevance. (p. 69).

It is this unifying quality of stories that makes them a powerful venue through which to examine practices and beliefs. As we listen to a story, we bring ourselves into a context developed partly by the storyteller and partly by our own ways of knowing the world. We draw very personal meaning from the stories we read, even when the people, places, and situations described are different from those we are familiar with. Similarly, Gee (2000, online summary) describes midlevel situated meanings as existing at the level of understanding at which we can utilize others’ experiences in ways that connect our personal, specific, and idiosyncratic experiences with larger, general, and abstract concepts.

Swearington (1990) compels us to continue to examine the ways we construct personal meaning from stories as we seek to develop a more culturally pluralistic orientation:

Historical and cross-cultural studies should continue to examine not only the universality of narrative, but also the roles played by different narrative modes in developing the metalinguistic consciousness that appears to be a precondition for reflection and abstract thought. (p. 195).

We can learn a tremendous amount about ourselves by attending to the way we respond to different characters and events within the stories we are told. Why do we react as we do? What emotions are stirred? What intentions do we attribute to those in the story? Feldman and et al. (1990) assert that our responses to stories give us insights about our everyday behaviors and beliefs: “No doubt the cognitive processing that we use to interpret human intentionality in stories is related to the processes we use to understand human intentionality in life encounters with other people” (p. 3). Stories may run the gamut from oral histories to personal narratives to folk tales. Each has its own special purpose and place, but all have a profound impact on the ways we frame our world.

With the pedagogical value of narrative firmly in mind, let us turn our attention to the Web-based instructional program School Stories. What are its goals? How is narrative used in it? How do the stories within the program affect teachers’ beliefs and behaviors?

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School Stories: The Instructional Internet Program

As Lorraine Johnson-Coleman puts it in her 1999 book Just Plain Folks, recording the stories of everyday people is “about letting some good people into a place they’ve never before been invited to enter” (p. 236). School Stories uses Internet technology to share the stories of some of those “good people” -- future educators who recount positive and negative experiences from their own school days. Each story is accompanied by the storyteller’s picture and a brief biographical sketch. Wrapped around these collections of positive and negative stories are instructional activities designed to compel readers to examine critical issues raised in the stories.

The overall goal of School Stories is to help preservice and inservice teachers better understand the impact, both positive and negative, they have on the students they teach. More specifically, School Stories offers educators and education students

• A forum for sharing their childhood academic and social school experiences
• An opportunity to reflect upon their professional beliefs, attitudes, and actions
• An environment that fosters appreciation of the influence a teacher can have on a child’s view of him- or herself, school, and learning in general

As shown in Figure 1, the School Stories homepage describes the program and links the visitor to pages of positive and negative stories (Figure 2). Within these pages, the visitor can read the stories and participate in activities. Links are provided that take the reader to information on topics raised in selected stories. There is also a “Read More About It” section on the positive and negative story pages, if readers desire more information.

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Evidence of School Stories Effectiveness

The reactions and responses of teachers to School Stories indicate that their experience of reading the stories holds great value for them. A summative evaluation instrument completed by 47 experienced teachers enrolled in a master’s level educational psychology course in which School Stories was used revealed the information included in Table 1. The teachers had been assigned to read the stories of students who had been enrolled in a previous course and had contributed the stories as a course assignment.

For 51 percent of the teachers, School Stories was their first Web-based assignment outside of a technology course. All the teachers agreed that the program had helped them think about ways they could be more supportive and effective with their students, and 98 percent agreed that School Stories had helped them become more sensitive to their students’ individual needs. Ninety-one percent of the teachers felt that the stories had affected their teaching behaviors.

The evaluation instrument also invited teachers to respond to the open-ended question, “How did School Stories affect you?” Several of their responses lend further evidence that both the positive and negative stories were valuable to the teachers:

This experience makes you realize how the memory really can stick with you for a long time and that what you say or the actions you take in your class will stick with your students (positive or negative).

After completing School Stories, when I walked back into my room on Monday, I had a very different attitude toward my students. I am much more aware of things I do and say.

School Stories has made me think for days about my own negative/positive experiences in school. In turn, these memories have made me think about how those experiences have affected my teaching.

Reading the School Stories made me realize what a lasting impact I can have on my students, especially a negative impact. The story of the teacher punishing the student in front of the whole class for hiding work really impacted me because I’ve done that to a student, too.

The accompanying pictures made the stories more meaningful for 62 percent of the teachers, and 94 percent found the instruction wrapped around the stories to be beneficial.

These results indicate that the pedagogical use of narrative in the School Stories project can have a profound effect on teachers’ reflections about their own teaching practices. It was not within the scope of this evaluation to document actual changes in teacher behavior after experiencing School Stories, but such a study would certainly be appropriate and useful. The inclusion of pictures also seemed to add to the stories’ effectiveness by offering another way to connect to the storytellers.

While most teachers found the instruction accompanying the stories to be beneficial, it is troublesome that fewer than half (43%) visited the additional “Read More About It” sections. The website links included in these sections were chosen carefully to propel teachers into more in-depth study. It may be the sad truth that even graduate students need specific requirements to do further study, especially if they are working full time. As the School Stories project continues to be revised and updated, it may be wise to require teachers working with it as an assignment to visit at least one site in each “Read More About It” section.

Following their reading of the stories posted to the School Stories site, the 47 teachers were given the opportunity to write about their own positive and negative experiences as school children. Several teachers explained the value of writing their own School Stories:

It was difficult for me but it forced me to evaluate myself. It has helped me be more aware of my actions toward my students, coworkers, and others.

I hope others can benefit in some way from reading my story. I felt positive about sharing. In a way it was like venting about some things I never had the opportunity to talk about.

It made me think about things that happened to me and be in touch with my feelings about those events. Getting in touch with those feelings helped me be much more sensitive with my students.

These comments are powerful because they go to the heart of reflective practice. With the narratives in School Stories propelling them, teachers wrote and shared their own school experiences with impressive energy and intense emotion. Seldom do teachers have the opportunity to enter into a collective, reflective discussion of teaching practices through the doors of their own very personal childhood experiences. While this type of discussion certainly has the potential to follow a rather unproductive road if the focus is too narrow, the model of the School Stories program led teachers to stimulating problem-solving after their stories were shared. Regardless of the different times and contexts of their stories, teachers were able to connect their own experiences to those of their students in ways they never had before.

As more current and future teachers share their stories, the depth and breadth of the project expands. School Stories will continue to be used in our courses as a catalyst for examining a multitude of educational practices and policies determined by the stories themselves. For example, some of the stories recently collected will serve as the springboard for examining issues involved in the teaching and learning of reading. It is also the intent of the site developers to enable those who visit School Stories to share their own stories on line, rather than being able only to read the stories contributed by others.

There is an important caution that should be noted with regard to programs such as School Stories -- namely, that the storytellers’ privacy is very important. All the School Stories participants read and signed agreements (approved by the San Diego State University Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects) to allow School Stories to use their first names, demographic data, pictures, and, of course, stories. The storytellers could give permission for some pieces of information to be used, while declining permission for others.